I made a light cake that wasn’t too sweet for my daughter’s birthday. She recently turned four years old and happens to love fresh strawberries so I made sure her cake included them. The cake is a basic sponge cake with whipped cream and fresh sliced strawberries.

You can use any of your favorite cake recipes, whether it is vanilla cake, yellow cake or sponge cake, which I used.

You can bake the cake in 9″ round cake pans, but I decided to use 2 square pans. I cut the two baked cakes into 2 layers each after they were removed from the pans and cooled, but didn’t want to make the cake too high so I only used 3 of the 4 layers. We just ate the 4th layer plain.

I whipped up 2 batches of whipped cream using 1 1/2 liquid cups of whipping cream mixed with 3/4 cups powdered sugar for each. You can add more or less sugar depending on how sweet you want it to be.

I mixed in 1 cup of washed, dried and sliced strawberries to one batch of cream for the filling and put the other batch into a piping bag fitted with a large coupler and the large Wilton 1M star tip.

I put the first layer of cake onto a plate ( I would have put it onto a 14″ cake board if we were bringing the cake somewhere) and spread the strawberries and cream mixture over top to cover it, leaving the sides plain. Then I put another layer of the sponge cake on top of it and spread the strawberries and cream mixture over top to cover it, leaving the sides plain once again. Next, I put the third layer of cake on top and covered it with rosettes using the plain cream. I then piped rosettes onto the sides of the cake as well.

I added some extra strawberries and cream to the plate just to add some color to it.

The cake was served almost immediately so I didn’t have an issue storing it, but if I were to serve it later on, it would need to be refrigerated. In that case I would have put it on a serving plate with dome lid or put it on a plate that would fit into a cake box. Another option would be to use a cake caddy.

Marie, I just saw this at Krista’s A Handful of Everything party, and had to come over and tell you how beautiful it is! The entire combination of sponge cake, fresh strawberries, whipping cream…a perfect birthday cake. And I have always loved square layer cakes….I don’t know why I never make one! 🙂